Pentagon Admits Preparing For Mass Civil Unrest In The US

An England soccer fan confronts a German riot policeman in Stuttgart city centre during the World Cup tournament June 24, 2006. REUTERS/Toby Melville (GERMANY)

A research program being run by the Department of Defense has basically admitted that the Pentagon has long been concerned about widespread civil unrest.

More shocking than that bombshell, is the fact that they are now funding universities to model the risks and tipping points that would come with a breakdown of American society at large.

The program costs millions of dollars, and is designed to derive “warfighter-relevant insights”. According to the Pentagon the purpose is for senior officials and decisions makes in “the defense policy community” to come up with contingency plans should widespread social unrest occur.

Known as the “Minerva Research Initiative”, the DOD had partnered with universities in 2008 in order to “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”

One was a Cornell-led study which was also managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It tried to create a model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilization and contagions.”

By studying past cases of mass social unrest (such as the “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey”) and the “digital traces” of online user behavior, the Pentagon was hoping to determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagions… They were trying to find out just how many outraged netizens and how many outraged posts would lead to actual demonstrations.

Such forewarning would obviously allow the Pentagon to act beforehand, perhaps by swiftly censoring Facebook, or by imposing a curfew in affected areas. If things ever got that bad that you had to act against the government… they already have you checkmated.

The Cornell study had analysed Twitter and Facebook posts and conversations so that it could “identify individuals mobilized in a social contagion and when they become mobilized.”

A more recent study by the University of Washington together with the US Army Research Office “seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate,” along with their “characteristics and consequences” and focuses on “large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity.”

This is basically an attempt at decrypting movements like Anonymous, so that the DOD could create its own manipulated variants or act beforehand to stop us from rising up.

This one seeks the tipping point for “supporters of political violence” to become active terrorists. From the study:

“In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group.This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence.”

Another 1.9 million dollar Minerva project tried to “anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.”

Professor David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin’s University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State:

“when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project.”

Professor Price is a veteran of such matters; The Pentagon’s Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program was previously uncovered by him. In HTS, social scientists would be embedded inside of military field operations, as well as training operations set in regions “within the United States”

The HTS training scenarios “adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq” to fit within the context of domestic situations “in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order.”

“Conspiracy Theorists” who believe that Jade Helm amounts to training for an eventual US-based scenario, who are skeptical of the sudden militarization of the police force, the spike in police murders as well as Homeland “Security’s” decision to purchase 1.6 billion extremely lethal hollow-point rounds (which are forbidden by international law for use in war), have just been vindicated by the actions of the US military itself. In the face of an ever-worsening wealth-gap between the richest and the poorest, it would defy logic for the government to NOT be preparing to protect itself from you.

Of course, it’s a conspiracy theory to ever question your betters, or to think critically of the same regime that murdered 500,000 to 1.3 million people in Iraq for fake nuclear WMDs…

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All it takes is to get those under paid police officers to stand up with us as well as those soldiers who fight for our liberties against the tyrannies that our forefathers had fought against to establish this nation as well as the reason why we have the second amendment so we can take down our government should it try to become tyrannical or fail to do the job we pay them to do, so far they aren’t doing a great job of it and no rendition of scenarios could ever protect them should it ever happen because of how they keep running their models. So lacking to rely on people to be honest or expect them to be consistent. Some people are more concerned about their family and people than their politicians. Patriae infelici fidelis. My Irish family motto.

Brian…news flash the second amendment was NOT done in order to take down our government. That is your opinion and you are wrong. Perhaps you need to go back to school and learn something about the history of this country and its Bill of Rights. Hint….they are not there for random interpretation. The words set forth are very explicit.

Please, please, please refrain from using mainstream mass media style headlines!
“Pentagon admits preparing for mass civil unrest in the US” does not equal your qualifying statement in the article…”has basically admitted that the Pentagon has long been concerned about widespread civil unrest”!
Similar words but essentially different basic meaning.
I honestly think that if you continue to use the popular mass media style of word manipulation (marketing) in the belief that the use of the same “attention grabbing” (and essentially dishonest) headlining gets more attention and readers, you’re probably right.
BUT…You will start losing credibility very quickly for using the same manipulative tactics as “them!”

If the GOP throws the election and somehow we have all parts of govt completely red, then in the 3 months between the election and the inauguration— get out of the U.S.— hit the nearest border and ask for asylum somewhere because the GOP is literally fascist and corporations also own and trick many Dems. Let’s get out.

The government isn’t going to arbitrarily go into a city/town/county whatever and start shooting people. Heck,given the civil issues over the past 5 years or so I would be more surprised if the government HADN’T taken notice.

How many incidents have we had of mass shootings, out of control and dangerous rioting (regardless of the reason) and so on; simple increases in the number of murders/homicides? The local LE officials would never be able to control a citywide issue without the help of government resources just as they can’t handle widespread major disasters, such as might be brought in my a major hurricane, independent of the government. The resources are what is needed but people need to be trained to handle the problem.

As for the political parties, agreed that neither side as a side is helping matters. This issue takes a middle of the road, common sense solution instead of far liberal or far conservative thinking.

Actually, far right or Conservative thinking is what is needed. Middle of the road is what put us in this position. None of which was common sense thinking. The misnomer is that the Republican party has been Conservative. Not even close. The other misunderstanding is what is meant by Conservatism. Reagan was the closest thing we have had to a Conservative thinker in decades. He is the only one. Bush Sr and Jr were not and are not Conservative. The Republicans in congress were not and are not Conservative either. Compared to the Socialist Democratic Party they are, but not in reality. The Republican Party is the middle of the road and Conservatism doesn’t exist in any numbers in politics. A true Conservative believes in the Constitution and more specifically the Bill of Rights. They do not believe it is a living breathing document. A true Conservative is color blind. Unlike the middle of the road and left. A true Conservative believes the Government needs to be limited in it’s power and the power belongs to the people. Unlike the middle of the road Republicans and the Democrats. A true Conservative believes in a tax code that leaves financial freedom in the hands of the money earners. A true Conservative believes in a balanced budget. A true Conservative believes in Religious Freedom, but understands that religions that specifically are a threat should be treated as such. Conservatives believe in the sanctity of life and life begins at conception. A real Conservative knows that the Constitution was written to spell out and defend our rights but those rights are provided by God. Nowhere in Conservatism is there room for the KKK, skin heads, Nazism, racism, or the diminishing of rights of any American citizen. Those are Socialist traits. I would like to see Conservatism actually put in practice. We would not be in the position we are now. The middle of the road and Socialism is all we have had for over 50 years with a 8 year hiatus with Reagan who still had to battle middle of the road and Socialist in Congress.